
“Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”
Variant: Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 207.
Secondary Sources
“Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”
Variant: Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Vol. XI, p. 242
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works
Context: When death comes, it does not ask your permission; it comes and takes you; it destroys you on the spot. In the same way, can you totally drop hate, envy, pride of possession, attachment to beliefs, to opinions, to ideas, to a particular way of thinking? Can you drop all that in an instant? There is no “how to drop it”, because that is only another form of continuity. To drop opinion, belief, attachment, greed, or envy is to die — to die every day, every moment. If there is the coming to an end of all ambition from moment to moment, then you will know the extraordinary state of being nothing, of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement, as it were, and dropping over the edge — which is death. I want to know all about death, because death may be reality; it may be what we call God — that most extraordinary something that lives and moves and yet has no beginning and no end.
happy landing
Happy Landing, written by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White (1962)
Song lyrics, With The Miracles
Book Two, Part II “The Water”, Chapter 1 (p. 170)
The Birthgrave (1975)